Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

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Digital Larry
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Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by Digital Larry »

I got 5/4 OK. I've been reading this: https://github.com/hydrogen-music/hydrogen/issues/257

And it seems unclear whether 9/8 is even possible. I got something serviceable by setting a length of 12 and resolution at 16T, but it doesn't line up with Ardour set to 9/8. I can't exactly tell what is happening there. I'll try recording some MIDI and see what happens.
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by AlexTheBassist »

Why Hydrogen? I can understand that only if you're 80+ and just can't learn anything new, otherwise I don't get why you people stick to Hydrogen anyway. It's too limited even for having fun with it, and one certainly can't take it seriously in a commercial situation. Ardour has a MIDI editor good enough to do any kind of stuff you want. If you want Hydrogen style in Ardour, you can use multiple MIDI tracks with no instruments on them, and then mix all the MIDI on a single MIDI bus, which should contain a drum sampler of your choice. That's it; you don't need to revert to ancient incomplete stuff for novices.
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by sadko4u »

You may use MIDI track + LSP Sampler as some sort of replacement for Hydrogen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsNfZ0TF-bk
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by merlyn »

If I set the 'size' to 9 and the 'res' to 16 it looks like 9/8. The beats are numbered 1 2 3 4 5 which is less than ideal, but it's the right length.
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Digital Larry
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by Digital Larry »

I don't have any love affair with Hydrogen going on. The aspects of Hydrogen which are currently important to me:

a) Can loop a pattern or song while acting as JACK timing master to SooperLooper - Ardour cannot loop in JACK mode.

b) Ability to edit note velocities easily. This is pretty important as I don't rely on "humanize" settings for everything. I tried doing some percussion editing in Ardour. The grid's OK although I prefer to see the note names. Maybe there's a way to set note names in Ardour for drums? But it looked to me like you have to right click on each note to edit its velocity and you can't see the velocity contour of a MIDI phrase at all. Please tell me I'm wrong! But even if that were possible, we're back to "a".

I don't have any love affair with Ardour going on either. I've gone on at some length about my quest for a loop recording tool that works well with the way I like to create music and given that I'm 87 years old, or feel like it sometimes, yeah... I need something that is simple and straightforward to operate when I am both the engineer and the artist.

Спасибо!
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Digital Larry
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by Digital Larry »

merlyn wrote:If I set the 'size' to 9 and the 'res' to 16 it looks like 9/8. The beats are numbered 1 2 3 4 5 which is less than ideal, but it's the right length.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a try.
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by merlyn »

Adam Neely has a good video about 9/8.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGN4juGQ-0A

Scottish and Irish folk music is sometimes in 9/8 and the feel is :

bidely-didely-didely = 1 2 3 2 2 3 3 2 3 = tri-pi-let tri-pi-let tri-pi-let

There are other ways of dividing the bar :

1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 3

which is the quick-quick-quick-slow of Balkan folk music described in the video.
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Digital Larry
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by Digital Larry »

I've played a lot of Celtic over the years and yes 9/8 is a "slip jig". The tune at hand is an original tune that I made up on the guitar and I only recently figured out that it was in 9/8. There's another part similarly constructed which is in 5/4 so that's my big creative goal for the moment. I wouldn't consider this Celtic though - it's more folk/bluesy? But I'm going to try to give it a hard rock edge with some guitars.

The phrasing in the 1st part is diddley-diddley-boom but still on a steady pulse of 3 beats, as the toe taps.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll check them out.
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by ahellquist »

Digital Larry wrote:I don't have any love affair with Hydrogen going on. The aspects of Hydrogen which are currently important to me:

b) Ability to edit note velocities easily. This is pretty important as I don't rely on "humanize" settings for everything. I tried doing some percussion editing in Ardour. The grid's OK although I prefer to see the note names. Maybe there's a way to set note names in Ardour for drums? But it looked to me like you have to right click on each note to edit its velocity and you can't see the velocity contour of a MIDI phrase at all. Please tell me I'm wrong! But even if that were possible, we're back to "a".
!
I believe you are wrong here.

You can change the value by using the scroll wheel without even clicking on the note. you can select many notes and change them together using the same method. There are most likely more ways to do it that I'm not aware of.

/Anders
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by milo »

Yes, you can also edit the velocity values numerically in the midi list editor: http://manual.ardour.org/midi/midi-list-editor/.

But I agree with the OP that the Ardour midi interface, while arguably adequate, is not ideal. Some people really like it, and I find it usable, but I would much prefer to have vertical bars to visualize and edit the note velocities. The human visual system is much better at comparing the lengths of adjacent lines than the color hues of adjacent areas.
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by English Guy »

AlexTheBassist wrote:Why Hydrogen? I can understand that only if you're 80+ and just can't learn anything new, otherwise I don't get why you people stick to Hydrogen anyway. It's too limited even for having fun with it, and one certainly can't take it seriously in a commercial situation. Ardour has a MIDI editor good enough to do any kind of stuff you want. If you want Hydrogen style in Ardour, you can use multiple MIDI tracks with no instruments on them, and then mix all the MIDI on a single MIDI bus, which should contain a drum sampler of your choice. That's it; you don't need to revert to ancient incomplete stuff for novices.
Have to agree to disagree on that one. Doing any decent song length drums on Ardour / Mixbus is a challenge. I must confess to programming on Hydrogen, importing it to Mixbus as midi then quantising it (I use it to drive Drumgizmo). I also find the workflow from first demo (simple beat) to final song length part (complexity) very easy to do, developing as I go with DAW and hydrogen synced via jack. Right tool for the right job.
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by AlexTheBassist »

English Guy wrote:Doing any decent song length drums on Ardour / Mixbus is a challenge
It's a challenge regardless of tools used.
English Guy wrote:programming on Hydrogen, importing it to Mixbus as midi then quantising it (I use it to drive Drumgizmo)
Why so many inconvenient steps? I have no problems writing drum parts in Ardour or Mixbus for any genre, including progressive rock/metal. I don't know what your problem with this software is; I always found Hydrogen to be more a toy app than a piece of musical software.
Being creative does not imply being lazy, stupid, or illiterate.

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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by English Guy »

AlexTheBassist wrote:
English Guy wrote:Doing any decent song length drums on Ardour / Mixbus is a challenge
It's a challenge regardless of tools used.
English Guy wrote:programming on Hydrogen, importing it to Mixbus as midi then quantising it (I use it to drive Drumgizmo)
Why so many inconvenient steps? I have no problems writing drum parts in Ardour or Mixbus for any genre, including progressive rock/metal. I don't know what your problem with this software is; I always found Hydrogen to be more a toy app than a piece of musical software.
(sorry I have not redacted the above I am on holiday and on my phone)

The whole point of what I am trying to say is that working at song length is easier on Hydrogen, I do not find it a challenge. I find it's work flow logical, fast and effective. It is easier to manipulate velocity to get more realistic playing and fills. The humanise feature is awesome. I consider it far from a toy and have been very happy with my results.
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by DecAgnts »

merlyn wrote: Tue Oct 01, 2019 12:39 pm If I set the 'size' to 9 and the 'res' to 16 it looks like 9/8. The beats are numbered 1 2 3 4 5 which is less than ideal, but it's the right length.
I'm having a similar problem (in 6/8), and this fix isn't working for me.

If I adjust Hydrogen's size setting for six beats, or twelve, that works fine for Hydrogen by itself, but when it's Jack-synced to another program, it will count four of those beats (as though it were still in 4/4) and then loop. It will not play the last two beats. This is true even if the peer programs have their own time set to 6/8, so I don't know where it's getting its notion of 4/4 here unless it's just baked into Hydrogen's code somehow.

For me, Hydrogen's killer feature has always been its ability to send separate drums out separate Jack audio connections, allowing me to send them out separate physical ports in my interface to a hardware mixer, process, and return into the DAW. The suggestions I've had for doing things like this in drumkv1 involved running multiple instances, and while it certainly is a light enough program to do that without having too much of a resource footprint, splitting my drum part across multiple application instances is really annoying and inconvenient.

But...the sequencer in Hydrogen...sucks. There, I said it. Really, it sucks for anything more than simple x0x style grid programming. So, I find myself launching Hydrogen (which is nowhere near as light as drumkv1 or DrumGizmo) just to use it as a sound source, and sequencing it externally. I know all of this is just gratuitous griping, but I do have to agree with the original poster -- there are things Hydrogen does that make it worthwhile, but it still falls so far short. There's a plugin called DrMr that could be the solution someday. It's a plugin that plays Hydrogen drumsets, but it still has some rough edges, and for my use, the part that still kills is that like drumkv1 and DrumGizmo, it doesn't support per instrument outputs, and maybe never will.

That's the main feature that keeps sending me back to Hydrogen....
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Re: Anyone know how to do 9/8 in Hydrogen?

Post by milkii »

jig-it-y jig-it-y jig-it-y

they/them ta / libreav.org / wiki.thingsandstuff.org/Audio and related pages / gh

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